This reminded me of the better documentary films I have seen, The Atomic Cafe (1982).
It is a well-crafted film, with a neat-o formal technique of only using found footage/ audio to describe the history of US atomic-age propaganda.
More interestingly to me, it offers a useful commentary about the contradictions between the use of media to present nuclear wars a survivable and possibly necessary event but simultaneously an existential threat that requires the total resources of the state to avoid. The ending of the film seems especially useful as footage of naive "duck and cover" drills is juxtaposed with (legitimately terrifying) images of actual bomb blasts.
I think, in general, it recalled this bit: "Christopher Isherwood gave expression to this unreality of the American daily life, exemplified in the motel room: "American motels are unreal! /.../ they are deliberately designed to be unreal. /.../ The Europeans hate us because we've retired to live inside our advertisements, like hermits going into caves to contemplate.""
Dr Strangelove was obviously about the absurdity of trying to plan for nuclear war, but the ending credit scene of nuclear bombs exploding while playing "We'll Meet Again" by Vera Lynne sounds like it might have influenced "The Atomic Cafe".
Interestingly, the detail in the linked document that made me think of a movie was the improvised lean-to shelter. One of the protagonists in the British film "When The Wind Blows" built one in his house while following a similar guide.
Yes, I can certainly agree that the ending montage in both films is similar enough that we'd suspect one influenced the other.
I used to really enjoy bringing Strangelove into my history of film classes as an opportunity to talk about obscenity and the end of the US PCA-- the opening sequence of "Try a Little Tenderness" across the mating of a tanker and a bomber is the first of many, many implied situations
I remember Atomic Cafe, when it came out it was pretty popular in Germany, where I grew up. At the time we were assuming we'd be the first to go, being right between the two big atomic powers. Everyone I knew back then assumed there's really nothing you could do, though.
The notion that duck and cover is a bad strategy is ill informed. Sure, if you’re at ground zero it doesn’t make a lick of difference what you do but if you’re further out but still close enough to experience the shock wave then duck and cover is going to be the reason why you don’t get a face full of glass and wood splinters.
But still, it's part of a larger apparatus of making nuclear war appear to be "reasonable" alternative when in reality it is a horrific crime against all humanity; if you haven't seen the film, you might enjoy how it presents these drills, along with all of the other apparatus of selling nuclear war to US population.
Why not? I mean, you could ask the same question for 1 week, 1 month, 6 months, whatever.
And I don't think it's an immediate zero-to-normal kind of situation. You might be unable to get much/any food at all for a week or three, and then you might only be able to get emergency rations from the government. And then after a few months, some staples might start trickling in, with increasing quantities over time.
Eventually, after a year or so, things might be back to some reasonable percentage of normal. But all throughout, given high levels of stress, anxiety, and uncertainty, it'd probably be nice to not have to worry too much about what kind and quantity of food you'll be able to get, because you already have enough to last you a long time.
If we're talking about "a couple" years, and the situation is still essentially that no food is available for purchase or from the government, I expect the situation is so bad that society has at least partially collapsed. By that point I would think you would have needed to relocate, and have started growing your own food or hunting, well before you get to the couple-of-years point. But I suppose if you did actually store a couple of years of food, and you had a stable, safe, and secure shelter location, you could probably stay.
> Why not? I mean, you could ask the same question for 1 week, 1 month, 6 months, whatever.
Of course, that's why I'm asking! For some time periods there are some pretty obvious answers. A fairly routine natural disaster like a flood or blizzard could easily disrupt food access for a week. A month is probably more difficult to imagine, at least in very wealthy nations/regions. At 6 months I think it already starts to get difficult to imagine the scenario.
My entire financial planning model is founded on a lack of global thermonuclear war. Now I need to figure out what to short so I can take advantage of this black swan event?
This is the only thing that makes me want to learn radio. I don't want to buy expensive gear, but being able to build my own DIY QRP (low-power) DX (long-distance) CW (Morse) transceiver? Count me in.
Too bad there doesn't seem to be extensive information to introduce us digital engineers to the hobby.
I don't want a kit. I want to learn the fundamentals so I can be ready when the society collapses and the ham übermenschen rule the world.
The ARRL Handbook is still the best overall introductory material, I think. Depends on how old-school you want to get. SDR? Pre-SDR digital techniques? Analog-only? Analog-only with discrete transistors? Vacuum tubes...? The Handbook will bring you up to speed on all but the latter, and for that, there's always the older editions.
It's global thermonuclear war. There won't be internet, cell reception, or even a power grid.
The radio in those is pretty short distance (ham can do 1000s of Km) and they draw a lot of power that you'll want to save since (if you're lucky) you'll be running on car batteries in remote areas.
But now I'm wondering how the aftermath will affect propagation conditions.
Target lists of other nations do not include all large metro areas in the US. A list for Russia was leaked once; by NY, LA, Seattle, but the middle of the country was mostly untouched. Presumably local infra in many areas will be disconnected from the old larger grid but locally intact.
Still functioning gadgets with WiFi will be all over and can make a local mesh network. Dams, wind turbines, utility lines, will remain.
It’s not aliens with doomsday weapons hitting all human occupied places from space.
That said it’s really what survivors do about that. Not hard to see many in shock ending themselves given the lack of hands on survival skills, and connection to the manual labor that keeps us alive, like farming.
Do it. I got my license from a free course and test in San Diego and have enjoyed it ever since. Finding info can be pretty easy but I'm on my phone so can't provide links right this second.
I suppose this is of special interest now since Poland, a NATO member, got hit by what sounds like an errant missile from Russia recently. [1]
Reading the first part, I think the best thing that could happen in the event some big red buttons get pushed is that if you're next to a military base you're probably going to be vaporized along with it if you can't evacuate. Trying to survive that kind of thing sounds way worse.
Everyone but the Ukrainian president who earlier said that the missile was an attack on 'collective security' and demanded from NATO that it swiftly punishes the perpetrator))
And when Ukrainian military tries to intercept them, stray Ukrainian S-300 missiles sometimes kill civilians on the ground. Awkward, right? Better say that Russians are repurposing ground-to-air missiles and firing them at Ukrainian civilians.
This time it was Polish civilians and the lie won't fly.
"Three U.S. officials said preliminary assessments suggested the missile was fired by Ukrainian forces at an incoming Russian missile" [0]
Interesting, but no thank you. I consider myself lucky to be living around one of the largest nuclear stockpiles on the planet. Huge target for the enemies. So, if nuclear attack is imminent, I would likely not even feel my body disintegrating. I'm more worried about the survivors.
My dad said they would do air raid drills in elementary school (50's, 60's) due to the fear of a nuclear attack. They were taught to get under their desks.
Apparently getting under their desks was on the off-chance their school is far enough away to avoid being incinerated but still close enough for a pressure wave to blow out all the glass in the windows and turn it into projectiles.
This came in handy when that meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk a few years ago. A teacher remembered the training and had everyone hide under desks, and they were spared laceration from the blown-in windows.
In Russia, this kind of training is not a long-gone relic - there's a class in school that's dedicated to survival in various situations, covering all kinds of stuff from emergency first aid to making shelter in the wilds. A subset of that is dealing with anthropogenic disasters, and a subset of that is civil defense. If I remember correctly, we had two hours covering nukes alone - likely targets in the vicinity, what kind of damage to expect where, how to build fallout shelters, when to evacuate etc. So far as I know, this all is still taught in schools there.
In Soviet times, the class was called "preliminary military training", and focused more on that aspect - not quite to the point where they'd shoot things, but it would involve timed field-stripping an AK, for example, and reading military topographic maps.
After 1991, the military aspects were stripped out, although in many schools they turned into an opt-in afterschool "patriot club" or some such. These were the primary source of videos like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrxjYfl05ek.
Recently, they've announced that they'll be reviving the old Soviet format, so it'll become mandatory for all high schoolers again, beginning with the next school year (starting in September, 2023).
Everyone, especially in pseudo-intellectual circles like HN sneers at the whole "duck and cover" thing but any grade schooler can look a the concentric circles on a map and tell you that the area in which you'd best protect your noggin from the drop ceiling dropping a little more than designed is far greater than the area in which burns are a problem.
The tradeoff is raising generations of children terrified of nukes destroying their world at any moment. Better safe than sorry, as you suggested, but it's not a zero cost strategy.
I went to school during those decades. For us, it was listening to how bad drugs were (grouping in Marijuana with Heroin and the rest) by a police officer lecturing us (they called it DARE - DARE to keep kids off drugs.) I would have preferred duck and cover personally
I remember doing these. Air raid sirens would go off, we would dive under out desks, wait until teacher said we could get up. Sometimes we did drills to all march, in an orderly manner, out of the classroom into the basement of the classroom building, or to the locker rooms at the gym. IIRC during the Cuban missile crisis we got sent home early one or two days, but my memory is a bit fuzzy on that. This was in Bethesda, MD, adjacent to DC.
I've lived near Camp David and Site R for 50+ years, so we always joked that if the missiles ever started flying, we'd be the first to know and go.
i think its better not to spend time and energy coming up with ways to prolong your suffering in an unlikely scenario but that’s just me. that’s to say i don’t have a plan, but rather it’s much shorter and weighs on me less
Eh people lived and died for generations doing awful subsistence farming and watching half their children die (if they didn't die in childbirth themselves). Not getting acute radiation poisoning and dying painfully over days in one of the worst ways possible for the low low cost of having a basement and keeping some water in it seems within the cards. I guess you could just kill yourself and your family immediately, which would also prevent a slow agonizing death from radiation poisoning, but I don't hate my basement enough to go out and buy a gun.
I think people are assuming that a nuclear disaster would be the end of the world.
There are all kinds of scenarios where a nuclear disaster comes into the picture but society is intact, while also massively disrupted. In such a case more people would lose their lives from panic, starvation, infection, lack of clean water than anything exotic like radiation or a nuclear blast. This is why I have some preps; it’s not to survive if the world turns into a Walking Dead episode but as a way to prevent dying over something mundane before help arrives a few weeks or months later.
The site is down so I can only speculate what it recommends. Whatever it is, I suspect it is not a list of suggestions for how to avoid nuclear disasters altogether. Because that is simply not in vogue. It seems we must all accept as something inevitable to have the specter of millions dead, if not billions, if not life as we know it, hanging over our heads for time eternal.
Because we as humans are seemingly only endowed with creative and innovative thinking when it comes to advertising, crypto scams or new JS frameworks, etc. When it comes to accomplishing something as basic as survival we seem to revert thoughts and prayers, and amassing even more weapons. It's frankly a mystery.
Russia also blown up ammo storage in Czechia killing two years ago, guess what happened... And mind that was intentional act far away from Russian or Ukrainian border, not some misguided missile right across border fence.
It takes literally 0 imagination to avoid nuclear disasters altogether. A handful of people in the entire world need not to do something extremely stupid. They can leave their special keys at home, overwrite the codes with baseball scores in their mind, and no nuclear apocalypse will happen. The fact that this has not happened is not due to a failure of imagination. That doesn't mean the reason is good, obviously, but doesn't the idea that we should be blaming a pdf seem a little silly to you?
The sword of Damocles is indeed hanging over our heads. Morons hung it there, and morons stand around waiting to prevent anyone from taking it down. We should push towards denuclearization, and we shouldn't compromise. But also, we should have better public transportation. Doesn't mean that anyone mentioning seat belts is just a firm believer in the specter of car accidents. If you take the threat of these morons-in-charge and their nukes seriously (as I do), can't you see why someone might want to maximize their and their family's chances of survival? I'll note you haven't presented a solution any single person can work with either- perhaps it is a difficult problem.
Edit: There's an argument to be made that having a fallout shelter would make you more complacent. But I'd expect the average person who is worried enough about nuclear war to dig a bunker is probably more worried with that bunker than the average person is without it. The opposing viewpoints are "nuclear war is potentially possible and very bad" and "nuclear war won't happen". There are probably people who believe in a MAD-style argument for the latter, but my bet is that most of them just don't think through how scared they should be. Things have been fine so far, after all. Nevermind all the warheads just sitting in silos. This silent majority is not thinking about how to survive nuclear war. They, in their heart of hearts, do not think it is a concern.
> you haven't presented a solution any single person can work with either- perhaps it is a difficult problem.
Exactly; it's a tough problem. Much as I admire my own intellect [/s], I hardly think I can come up with a solution by myself, no. If we were an "army of millions" who were thinking hard about the problem then we would have sporting chance I think - but we are not that many (which, again, is frankly baffling).
Other than that, for the record I don't believe this is a problem of morons vs intelligent people. Political leaders, leaders of the military, and the others that we might want to point fingers at in this context are probably highly intelligent. It's just that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The initiative likely needs to come from people that are not already mired in the system.
I absolutely agree, but doesn't that precisely undermine your point? There's nothing about trying to prevent nuclear apocalypse that isn't "in vogue", it's just widely seen as a hard problem. And if it's a hard problem, isn't there a place for looking at the far easier one of reading a few papers and noticing that a few steps taken in advance could make a big difference in survival odds (assuming you aren't one of the many people annihilated instantly and pointlessly in the initial blast).
And yeah, I'd like to believe there's a good reason for nuclear proliferation, and today things are pretty locked in by game theory, but there was absolutely a decision made early on! During WWII Germany was nowhere near finishing a nuclear weapon, and the Soviet Union only worked it out with the help of a spy. Seems like there was at least a shot of no one developing nukes if the Manhattan project hadn't happened.
> It takes literally 0 imagination to avoid nuclear disasters altogether. A handful of people in the entire world need not to do something extremely stupid. They can leave their special keys at home, overwrite the codes with baseball scores in their mind, and no nuclear apocalypse will happen. The fact that this has not happened is not due to a failure of imagination. That doesn't mean the reason is good, obviously, but doesn't the idea that we should be blaming a pdf seem a little silly to you?
Have you a gameplan to cause this possible series of actions to manifest in physical reality with zero chance of failure?
Absolutely not! Is this because I have failed to imagine a world without a nuclear threat, or because the problem is very hard? Not the former! As proof see counterexample- I can imagine a nukeless world just fine.
What’s your alternative? Everyone agreeing to sit round the campfire, hold hands and sing kumbaya? You can’t possibly be this naive.
There’s something uniquely frustrating about seeing somebody like you, who has a completely naive and childlike worldview, assuming that YOU are just a genius and everyone else is an idiot.
> There’s something uniquely frustrating about seeing somebody like you, who has a completely naive and childlike worldview, assuming that YOU are just a genius and everyone else is an idiot.
I may be an idiot, but you seem confused: first you assume that I can not be this naïve, then you conclude that I am? Let me assure you, I'm not that naïve, but I don't presume to have the solution either. I agree that would have been better, but there you go. Maybe if we were more people than the vanishing few that I encounter, maybe then we would have something we could try.
More weapons that are likely to start a third world war by mistake is not a satisfactory solution IMO.
The alternative to millions upon millions of intelligent people strapping their blinders on every day and refusing to see where we are heading is that a tiny fraction of these get together and start thinking out solutions.
> What’s your alternative? Everyone agreeing to sit round the campfire, hold hands and sing kumbaya? You can’t possibly be this naive.
I can’t speak for the OP, but this is an issue I’ve been interested in for some time. I think the alternatives are many, but it involves a multipronged approach, starting with reforming the financial sector, which helps fund warmongering in several different sectors, followed by slowly converting the defense industry into a civilian engineering sector (climate change remediation, infrastructure rebuilding and development, space based energy, transportation and habitation) combined with tearing the heart out of the arms sector and enforcing the law against so-called "lords of war" who help arm both sides. That’s just to start. The idea that peacetime can be more profitable than wartime needs to be a new mantra supported by financial incentives and large scale engineering projects that help benefit everyone instead of diverting resources to build more weapons and make a few companies wealthy while squandering the wealth of public treasuries that could otherwise support their people. The idea that war is a still a legitimate solution to a problem is the psychological hurdle that needs to be overcome. Nobody has to accept that this is the way it is. It requires courageous acts of individuals to stand up and say one word: no. I ain’t gonna study war no more. It’s really that simple. The hard part is getting the momentum for everyone to stop doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.
The hostile responses you've go this do rather demonstrate your point. Building peace in a world bristling with nukes held by independent sovereignties with limited information about each other and often incongruent self-defined 'interests', is indeed a hard problem. Hard problems require work and thought and research to try to solve. If conditions change to make the problem harder, more resources and work are required.
That readers here find that requirement incomprehensible for this specific hard problem is exactly the point. Peacebuilding (as an activity, an actual diplomatic project, not a hope) has indeed fallen out of vogue and out of the collective political imagination. Little being permanent in international relations, it could yet return.
Thanks, good to hear some agreement, and I share your hope even if I'm growing more pessimistic by the day.
It always creates a stir to point out the absurdity of our current predicament. If I was a psychologist I might conclude that this is because many actually share my deep sense of despair, but can see no other solution that to trod on "in the machine" so to speak. I can sympathize, but we need to start doing something, to prod the diplomats in the right direction if nothing else.
I'm an abjurer of optimism and pessimism equally, but hope can be useful. In a way the situation is even worse than your original comment suggested. More than just the indifference of being 'out of vogue', there's a lot of active hostility to the very notion of peacebuilding, as some responses suggested. But in the end, the main alternatives to active institution-and-culture-building are either to passively await a randomish fate, or pure militarism (whether defensive or aggressive). It's entirely predictable, given the growth in technology, that either of those alternatives does lead deterministically to catastrophe. Peacebuilding, frustratingly intractable though the problems may seem, is really all there is.
There have been plenty of viable commons over human history. Peacebuilding is in large part the process of building institutions to manage them. The failure to put in the work to build such institutions, or to maintain them once created, is what the TOTC consists in.
I was subject to discussions at school about the UK gov's ludicrous 'Protect and Survive' novelty booklet in the 70s. Some years later The Young Ones episode 'Bomb' seemed like the most appropriate response.
Having grown up pretty much assuming I'd be incinerated by nukes at some point (I frequently dreamed of mushroom clouds on the horizon as a child), this is all nothing new to me. I've lived longer than I ever expected.
I find it almost satirical that a guide on an imminent nuclear disaster is a 13-page pdf of dense text. If the producers of this guide are serious about their mission, this needs to be condensed into a flowchart with short statements and plenty of pictures that can be absorbed quickly. More detailed info can be tacked on the end, but some bolded statements in the middle of a wall of words is not how you communicate in an emergency.
An ICBM will take ~20-30 minutes from launch to hit the US. By the time you are notified, you will have 5-15 minutes to prepare. This goes down to minutes to seconds for dirty bombs/ground detonations or short range missiles (to which the US is not immune thanks to submarines).
i skimmed through it, it only makes sense for population centers not targeted or attacked. If you're in a city that is a target the best thing to do IMO is setup an informational circuit breaker where, once flipped, you get the hell out of dodge and wait for more information.
it's assumed that everyone will be at home when a nuclear disaster happens, but it would probably happen on a weekday early in the morning, when kids are in the school, wife or husband is at work, and the chance that all of us get safe to the bunker is small.
I’d do something really interesting, so that the author of my world would be forced to focus on me and continue my life story. Because the only place where nuclear war is a realistic possibility is in a fictional setting.
It seems that most of you are ignoring that there are plenty of actors out there that actively seek destruction and ways to promote it. It's not that people are stupid. Many people of power are both intelligent and actively evil, as in-- working against your interests of survival--especially when their positions are threatened.
In fact, in some rare scenarios, nuclear destruction might even make logical sense to someone in power. One such scenario is evening out the playing field when you are way behind everyone else in the race. Do you recall how playing the "Armageddon" card in certain scenarios of Worms could actually help you win?
> Of course there’s going to be some wackos on that lot. Not so many with access to nuclear weapons, fortunately.
How would we know, one way or the other? I mean, it only takes a few wackos to trigger such a scenario. And there are clearly a lot of wackos among 8 billion people. Doesn’t seem far fetched to me at all.
Always tried to live somewhere near ground zero. Right now I live just far enough away that I'll have time to repeat after H. G. Wells, " God damn you all, I told you so."
129 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] threadIn all seriousness, in a true nuclear disaster the survivors will envy the dead.
It is a well-crafted film, with a neat-o formal technique of only using found footage/ audio to describe the history of US atomic-age propaganda.
More interestingly to me, it offers a useful commentary about the contradictions between the use of media to present nuclear wars a survivable and possibly necessary event but simultaneously an existential threat that requires the total resources of the state to avoid. The ending of the film seems especially useful as footage of naive "duck and cover" drills is juxtaposed with (legitimately terrifying) images of actual bomb blasts.
I think, in general, it recalled this bit: "Christopher Isherwood gave expression to this unreality of the American daily life, exemplified in the motel room: "American motels are unreal! /.../ they are deliberately designed to be unreal. /.../ The Europeans hate us because we've retired to live inside our advertisements, like hermits going into caves to contemplate.""
Interestingly, the detail in the linked document that made me think of a movie was the improvised lean-to shelter. One of the protagonists in the British film "When The Wind Blows" built one in his house while following a similar guide.
I used to really enjoy bringing Strangelove into my history of film classes as an opportunity to talk about obscenity and the end of the US PCA-- the opening sequence of "Try a Little Tenderness" across the mating of a tanker and a bomber is the first of many, many implied situations
But still, it's part of a larger apparatus of making nuclear war appear to be "reasonable" alternative when in reality it is a horrific crime against all humanity; if you haven't seen the film, you might enjoy how it presents these drills, along with all of the other apparatus of selling nuclear war to US population.
And I don't think it's an immediate zero-to-normal kind of situation. You might be unable to get much/any food at all for a week or three, and then you might only be able to get emergency rations from the government. And then after a few months, some staples might start trickling in, with increasing quantities over time.
Eventually, after a year or so, things might be back to some reasonable percentage of normal. But all throughout, given high levels of stress, anxiety, and uncertainty, it'd probably be nice to not have to worry too much about what kind and quantity of food you'll be able to get, because you already have enough to last you a long time.
If we're talking about "a couple" years, and the situation is still essentially that no food is available for purchase or from the government, I expect the situation is so bad that society has at least partially collapsed. By that point I would think you would have needed to relocate, and have started growing your own food or hunting, well before you get to the couple-of-years point. But I suppose if you did actually store a couple of years of food, and you had a stable, safe, and secure shelter location, you could probably stay.
Of course, that's why I'm asking! For some time periods there are some pretty obvious answers. A fairly routine natural disaster like a flood or blizzard could easily disrupt food access for a week. A month is probably more difficult to imagine, at least in very wealthy nations/regions. At 6 months I think it already starts to get difficult to imagine the scenario.
As long as I find somewhere to hide with water, I can hopefully just outlast the initial waves of violence.
Eh, this is good for crypto.
That's funny, my financial planning model is founded on the opposite premise.
Too bad there doesn't seem to be extensive information to introduce us digital engineers to the hobby.
I don't want a kit. I want to learn the fundamentals so I can be ready when the society collapses and the ham übermenschen rule the world.
https://disaster.radio/
It is a work-in-progress long-range, low-bandwidth wireless disaster recovery mesh network powered by the sun.’
The radio in those is pretty short distance (ham can do 1000s of Km) and they draw a lot of power that you'll want to save since (if you're lucky) you'll be running on car batteries in remote areas.
But now I'm wondering how the aftermath will affect propagation conditions.
Still functioning gadgets with WiFi will be all over and can make a local mesh network. Dams, wind turbines, utility lines, will remain.
It’s not aliens with doomsday weapons hitting all human occupied places from space.
That said it’s really what survivors do about that. Not hard to see many in shock ending themselves given the lack of hands on survival skills, and connection to the manual labor that keeps us alive, like farming.
Only if you stockpile lots of GPUs and generators
Just sucks thinking about starting over, try to make RISC V out of sticks.
Not if you’re dead, you won’t be. IMO the much worse fate is remaining alive in an apocalyptic hellscape.
Reading the first part, I think the best thing that could happen in the event some big red buttons get pushed is that if you're next to a military base you're probably going to be vaporized along with it if you can't evacuate. Trying to survive that kind of thing sounds way worse.
Was nice knowing everyone!
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/15/russia-poland-missi...
https://twitter.com/JakeGodin/status/1592618577622093824
[1] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/russia-now-firing-s-30...
There, fixed that for you.
5V55K has the range of 47 km, Russia is much further from Poland than that.
Ukraine, on the other hand, uses Soviet S-300.
I'm glad that it (probably?) didn't turn out to be from Russia, though!
This time it was Polish civilians and the lie won't fly.
"Three U.S. officials said preliminary assessments suggested the missile was fired by Ukrainian forces at an incoming Russian missile" [0]
[0] https://apnews.com/article/g-20-summit-nato-biden-andrzej-du...
https://www.reuters.com/world/poland-blast-caused-by-missile...
After 1991, the military aspects were stripped out, although in many schools they turned into an opt-in afterschool "patriot club" or some such. These were the primary source of videos like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrxjYfl05ek.
Recently, they've announced that they'll be reviving the old Soviet format, so it'll become mandatory for all high schoolers again, beginning with the next school year (starting in September, 2023).
That said, I suspect these drills were more for theatre, like most of the TSA is now - put up a big visible show that you're doing _something_.
Reasonable people can disagree.
Too close? Incinerated. Doesn't matter.
Goldilocks nearby enough for glass shrapnel? Dodged some glass by being under desk! Win!
Far away? Heard a distant boom while under desk.
Hard to fault really.
Schools educate children to fit into society.
That was society at the time.
There was a brief, happy span of a couple decades without duck-n-cover or shooter drills, though.
I've lived near Camp David and Site R for 50+ years, so we always joked that if the missiles ever started flying, we'd be the first to know and go.
There are all kinds of scenarios where a nuclear disaster comes into the picture but society is intact, while also massively disrupted. In such a case more people would lose their lives from panic, starvation, infection, lack of clean water than anything exotic like radiation or a nuclear blast. This is why I have some preps; it’s not to survive if the world turns into a Walking Dead episode but as a way to prevent dying over something mundane before help arrives a few weeks or months later.
Because we as humans are seemingly only endowed with creative and innovative thinking when it comes to advertising, crypto scams or new JS frameworks, etc. When it comes to accomplishing something as basic as survival we seem to revert thoughts and prayers, and amassing even more weapons. It's frankly a mystery.
2. Pray
Poland is a NATO member, so that is the likely context of the submission.
The sword of Damocles is indeed hanging over our heads. Morons hung it there, and morons stand around waiting to prevent anyone from taking it down. We should push towards denuclearization, and we shouldn't compromise. But also, we should have better public transportation. Doesn't mean that anyone mentioning seat belts is just a firm believer in the specter of car accidents. If you take the threat of these morons-in-charge and their nukes seriously (as I do), can't you see why someone might want to maximize their and their family's chances of survival? I'll note you haven't presented a solution any single person can work with either- perhaps it is a difficult problem.
Edit: There's an argument to be made that having a fallout shelter would make you more complacent. But I'd expect the average person who is worried enough about nuclear war to dig a bunker is probably more worried with that bunker than the average person is without it. The opposing viewpoints are "nuclear war is potentially possible and very bad" and "nuclear war won't happen". There are probably people who believe in a MAD-style argument for the latter, but my bet is that most of them just don't think through how scared they should be. Things have been fine so far, after all. Nevermind all the warheads just sitting in silos. This silent majority is not thinking about how to survive nuclear war. They, in their heart of hearts, do not think it is a concern.
Exactly; it's a tough problem. Much as I admire my own intellect [/s], I hardly think I can come up with a solution by myself, no. If we were an "army of millions" who were thinking hard about the problem then we would have sporting chance I think - but we are not that many (which, again, is frankly baffling).
Other than that, for the record I don't believe this is a problem of morons vs intelligent people. Political leaders, leaders of the military, and the others that we might want to point fingers at in this context are probably highly intelligent. It's just that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The initiative likely needs to come from people that are not already mired in the system.
And yeah, I'd like to believe there's a good reason for nuclear proliferation, and today things are pretty locked in by game theory, but there was absolutely a decision made early on! During WWII Germany was nowhere near finishing a nuclear weapon, and the Soviet Union only worked it out with the help of a spy. Seems like there was at least a shot of no one developing nukes if the Manhattan project hadn't happened.
Have you a gameplan to cause this possible series of actions to manifest in physical reality with zero chance of failure?
There’s something uniquely frustrating about seeing somebody like you, who has a completely naive and childlike worldview, assuming that YOU are just a genius and everyone else is an idiot.
Also frustrating:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism_(psychology...
More weapons that are likely to start a third world war by mistake is not a satisfactory solution IMO.
As I suspected, you have no alternative.
Then maybe we'll get somewhere. That's all.
I can’t speak for the OP, but this is an issue I’ve been interested in for some time. I think the alternatives are many, but it involves a multipronged approach, starting with reforming the financial sector, which helps fund warmongering in several different sectors, followed by slowly converting the defense industry into a civilian engineering sector (climate change remediation, infrastructure rebuilding and development, space based energy, transportation and habitation) combined with tearing the heart out of the arms sector and enforcing the law against so-called "lords of war" who help arm both sides. That’s just to start. The idea that peacetime can be more profitable than wartime needs to be a new mantra supported by financial incentives and large scale engineering projects that help benefit everyone instead of diverting resources to build more weapons and make a few companies wealthy while squandering the wealth of public treasuries that could otherwise support their people. The idea that war is a still a legitimate solution to a problem is the psychological hurdle that needs to be overcome. Nobody has to accept that this is the way it is. It requires courageous acts of individuals to stand up and say one word: no. I ain’t gonna study war no more. It’s really that simple. The hard part is getting the momentum for everyone to stop doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.
The hostile responses you've go this do rather demonstrate your point. Building peace in a world bristling with nukes held by independent sovereignties with limited information about each other and often incongruent self-defined 'interests', is indeed a hard problem. Hard problems require work and thought and research to try to solve. If conditions change to make the problem harder, more resources and work are required.
That readers here find that requirement incomprehensible for this specific hard problem is exactly the point. Peacebuilding (as an activity, an actual diplomatic project, not a hope) has indeed fallen out of vogue and out of the collective political imagination. Little being permanent in international relations, it could yet return.
It always creates a stir to point out the absurdity of our current predicament. If I was a psychologist I might conclude that this is because many actually share my deep sense of despair, but can see no other solution that to trod on "in the machine" so to speak. I can sympathize, but we need to start doing something, to prod the diplomats in the right direction if nothing else.
Completely agree.
Having grown up pretty much assuming I'd be incinerated by nukes at some point (I frequently dreamed of mushroom clouds on the horizon as a child), this is all nothing new to me. I've lived longer than I ever expected.
As an X-gen child of the 70s/80s I was at various points terrified of nuclear bombs!
Watching Threads when I was way to young didn't help...
There are times when I'd lay terrified in bed when I heard a jet engine over my house, and thought it might be a nuclear bomb!
An article I read a while back suggested that X-Gen kids have a form of PTSD from the Cold War!
It's all been dragged up again recently!
Right now, it feels like the Cold War never ended.
An ICBM will take ~20-30 minutes from launch to hit the US. By the time you are notified, you will have 5-15 minutes to prepare. This goes down to minutes to seconds for dirty bombs/ground detonations or short range missiles (to which the US is not immune thanks to submarines).
Thank to your leaders.
In fact, in some rare scenarios, nuclear destruction might even make logical sense to someone in power. One such scenario is evening out the playing field when you are way behind everyone else in the race. Do you recall how playing the "Armageddon" card in certain scenarios of Worms could actually help you win?
Worms might not be a very detailed geopolitical simulator. The ninja rope was nice thoug.
How would we know, one way or the other? I mean, it only takes a few wackos to trigger such a scenario. And there are clearly a lot of wackos among 8 billion people. Doesn’t seem far fetched to me at all.